To Wei Perng, an associate professor of epidemiology at Colorado School of Public Health who has studied the effects of toxins on liver function, it was unclear why researchers thought the length of participants’ telomeres influenced the connection between liver scarring and toxin exposure. “What may be more powerful,” she said, is to consider the combination of shorter telomere length and environmental exposures.
“What we were able to do was group women who are more metabolically similar versus group women based on similarities in size,” said Ellen Francis, the lead author and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “If we’re interested in the risk of obesity that’s attributable to pregnancy, we probably need to start thinking a little beyond” BMI and gestational diabetes.
Kenneth Tyler, who studies EV-D68 pathogenesis, thinks something else is at play. Tyler, chair of the department of neurology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said work his laboratory has been doing in baby mice that are susceptible to developing AFM shows that some strains of EV-D68 are more likely to trigger neurological damage than others.
“This [is the] sort of study that people in my field dream about when we’re doing our Ph.D.s,” said Paul Norman, an associate professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.
Producing adequate amounts of the foam for humans and ensuring it meets the Food and Drug Administration’s safety standards will take some more work, said Joseph Onyiah, an assistant professor of gastroenterology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who was not involved with the study.
Op-ed from Emmy Betz, emergency physician and researcher at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus: I live and work in Colorado, a beautiful state that can look to an outsider like a year-round playground of sunshine and skiing. But my state has a big problem: suicide rates that are among the highest in the country.
